Bleeding Red by Sophia Larana

Title: Bleeding Red
Author: Sophia Larana
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: No Pairings
Length: 1 Chapters (436 words) Completed: Yes
Warnings: None
Published: 09/02/10 Updated: 09/02/10

Summary: Pansy reflects on killing a man. A Slytherin man, more over.

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

She had killed before. Countless times, actually. She had killed rich and poor, pathetic and honorable, sane and deranged, male and female. He was no different than the rest, not in the slightest. Pansy stared down at the man, lying on the harsh stone ground, his head at a grotesque angle; obviously, it had been broken.

Some of the other Death Eaters questioned her methods. They said it went against what they believed in, using other methods of killing besides wands. She didn't listen. This way, she was certain they were dead and, somehow, there was a strange comfort in allowing each victim to die the same way. Firstly, there was no risk of priori incantatem, which Pansy always avoided with extreme caution, and secondly, it seemed more intimate to her, for she had never wished to kill, and killing them by her own hand would, she foolishly hoped, channel some sort of sorrow and repentance. She had never wanted to become a killer. She killed for Draco, praying that the Dark Lord would spare him.

This man, she noted, was no different than the rest. He had escaped the Dark Lord, displeased him, and, therefore, was doomed to die. She knew nothing of what he had been, though she knew that he had attended Hogwarts some years after the Dark Lord himself, but before her father's time, and he had been a Slytherin; a Slytherin prefect, no less. Pansy knelt beside the body and nudged him onto his side, always careful not to believe fingerprints or otherwise incriminating evidence behind; each crime scene was dubbed, by the muggle police, an "accident" or "self-injury," after all, Pansy could not risk her reputation.

From the front, the man did not look very much different than he had been in life. His eyes were, thankfully, closed. It saved the mess of attempting to close them without leaving fingerprints. Perhaps, she had shocked him so thoroughly that his eyes had been closed. Something, however, caught her eye. In the corner of his mouth, a river of blood ran, sliding off his chin. It was a brilliant red, incredibly bright. At that moment, the invincible and independent Pansy Parkinson realized something: she was not untouchable. She had come from the same background as this man, even followed in his footsteps, to his extent and look where he had ended up. Eventually she would die. This all hit her as a few words went swimming through her mind, as if the dead man's frozen lips had uttered them: As much as we would like to deny it, Slytherins bleed red too.